Review: Boom for Real by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
It was Halloween night and I went to the theatre in costume as I always do. The show was Boom for Real by Jason Tremblay, produced by Paper Chairs. This company has a gift for finding truly unusual but serviceable performance spaces, albeit sometimes hard to find. I tramped through the crushed limestone parking lot of an industrial east Austin construction zone in my wobbly fireman’s boots, uncertain of my balance and vision behind my long-nosed mask and worried that I might be showing too much skin. I am such a typical Austinite.
The venue, by railroad tracks and near the old Blue Theatre (I could see the lights of Weird City Theatre’s Halloween party going on there) was the pretentiously named Museum of Human Achievement. It was a museum wearing a wooden frame warehouse costume. The production was of the multilevel, open-stages type, where the cast changes the set (all set objects are on casters), and lighting cues shift the audience’s focus and attention from scene to scene. A costume rack for the cast stood upstage right. Creative values were very much to the fore, technological artifice a little to the back. The heavily costumed audience knew what was expected of them in this twenty-first-century mode and seemed highly appreciative.
The story was set in mythic time and a kind of post-industrial-punk space. The world is drowning in a never-ending fall of ash, straight into the mouths of all the characters. A leading dancer has suffered a disfigurement, and with her single flash-memory chip of magic she banishes dance from the world city, a curse so severe that the word dance is also banned, replaced by the word petunias. The dancer becomes a witch living in a tower above the city, where she can watch and enforce the curse. A young dancer, Boom, played by Ashley Rae Spillers, discovers that it is her fate to bring dance back.
The theme here is ambition, served by its demon servant desire, at many different levels. Desire as lust is well portrayed, but desire for transformation, success, money, alcohol, nicotine and life itself suffuse the story so thoroughly that it is hard to keep track of all the categories. They suffer a blending effect and also cause the story to seem to ramble a bit.
The playwright may have been aware of this risk because he gave the work the form of a cycle, and stated this structure directly and refreshingly at the beginning of the performance in the words of The Theatre, played by Noel Gaulin, who told us that the play ends where it begins. By so saying, the playwright takes the pressure off the audience to figure out where the story is going. He also cues us that the nuggets for our appreciation are within the action of the play, not in some culmination at the end. The notification also takes some of the perplexity away as we follow the rambling quality of the action.
Let it be said now: the cast is the singular strength of this production, and Noel Gaulin is the primus inter pares. Although identified as The Theatre, he also refers to himself as the Director and at times he leads rehearsals at his theatre. Gaulin is becoming a force of nature in Austin theatre, and while he is necessarily out there on the edge given the roles he masters, he is also nuanced, capable of expressing something with the twitch of a finger or the curve of an eyebrow. I am not prone to overstatement, but on this night he looked as though he could have performed every role as a one-man show and played all the band instruments. Yet he never stepped on another actor’s line. His performance of “train” was hysterically funny and indescribable. Go see it.
The most highly regarded new productions in Austin are multi-modal, and Boom for Real stepped to the front rank. The artistic core is Tremblay’s discursive, narrative play drawing on myths and fairy tales, but music, puppetry and dance append to this core and heighten the production’s dynamic qualities. Mark Stewart composed an original score for the show and performed it live with a four-piece band configured for rock music; they included pre-show house music as their warm-up.
Dance was not simply a metaphor in the story but a strong branch of the overall production. The dance we saw went from awkward discovery after the curse was lifted to expressive mastery. To demonstrate progress between such extremes is a difficult task in any show. Long-time Austin choreographer Andrea Ariel years ago told a dance class (et moi) that her choreography for the movie Waiting for Guffman was exceptionally difficult because she had to make bad dance intentionally. All her life she had striven to achieve excellent choreography. But in Guffman she had to create bad dance deliberately per the screenplay— awkward, uncertain, inept movements, gestures and patterns. Boom for Real choreographer Elizabeth Doss faced the same task, plus a transformation to dance mastery. She met the challenge adroitly, followed step for step by the dancers—Letty Evans, Kelly Hasandras, Michelle Keffer and Hugo Vargas-Zesati, Furthermore, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is Ms. Doss’ first credited foray into theatrical choreography. We welcome much more from her.
As mentioned previously, lighting changed the scenes. This meant that Natalie George and director Keri Boyd accomplished a very close collaboration to great success. The basics of blocking posed the principal directorial challenge in this multilevel stage environment, and Boyd’s solutions gave the show a crisp, rapid pace.
Set designer Lisa Laratta simplified her concepts and gained subtlety at no loss of effectiveness. She gave us a painted backdrop, for which she is well-noted, of a swirling, particulate pollution-filled atmosphere backgrounding a witch tower made of stacked chairs. This was enough to create the play’s dark and complex world.
The twenty-first century sees a continuing trend of borrowing from classical plays, myths and fairy tales. So it is with Tremblay’s work. Most notably he borrows or lifts whole cloth the Judgment of Paris myth, complete with characters named Paris (Jacob Trussel) and Helena (Pilar Andujar), with humorous updating. Even so, the consequences, as you may recall, included the launching of the Trojan War. The best lines in the play are given here by Paris, spoken by Jacob Trussel. He gives the final wisdom on beauty, ambition and desire (wisdom dating all the way back from the Bronze Age) and also the final tragic temptation of Boom. Much of the dialogue of the play is exquisite and handled beautifully by this cast of fine actors
Despite these beauties and delights, not everything worked for this fast-paced, rambling multilevel performance. Mixing the fairy-tale and down-to-earth universes has to be crafted very carefully or not at all. The scene that worked least well involved a skeptical, observant character and a deceptive character trying to scam her and steal the Golden Heart. Suddenly, in walks a steamer trunk on legs trying also to steal the Golden Heart. Skeptical never sees the ambulatory furniture, nor does Scammer. They continue talking until the end of the scene. When suspension of disbelief falls away from an audience costumed to the nines as imaginative, fantasy characters, well, somebody somewhere has dropped the ball. I strongly urge that this scene be restaged before the end of the run.
The cyclical course of the play and plot create another issue for me. The story ends as it begins, with all the characters trapped, truly a dark ending. Those alive merely shift to different structural positions within the machinery of the story. They form the engine that drives the curse through yet another cycle. I observe that many young playwrights (and here I am not pointing at Tremblay or attacking him) can limn the world in darkness, but cannot light a candle against it. Others choose a No Exit style of existentialist outcome as a form of intellectual chic. Whatever the choices, and there are many, it is true in life that there is both light and darkness, and the balance between the two is the stuff of literature and great plays. It is also true that some people gain a kind of buy-out, or they escape the fate projected for them by their peers. Think of the “Most Likely to…” epigrams under yearbook pictures. Now there’s a rich field of irony. Some survive shipwreck. Some find wild success through education. The least interesting win the lottery. Others, by crafted design or by chance find some way out. These few inspire us all.
Nobody in Boom for Real found a way out, and this sameness of outcome, even The Theatre’s outcome, gave the story a peculiar flatness at the bottom of its cycle. Everyone took their place in that cycle, although some were deserving of transcendence. Surely Helena, by her talent alone, deserved more. But she merely exited, pursued by Paris and Charles (Dallas Tate), and later joined the chorus line in the theatre under the new curse. None of the characters were Sisyphus, rolling boulders uphill eternally. Instead, they were the boulders.
Paper Chairs clearly worked immensely hard to produce Tremblay’s complexities. I would have appreciated artists’ bios in the printed program, but there were none. Also, there was no credit for the interesting shadow puppet scene in Act I. From prior knowledge, I know that Kelly Hasandras (Karla/Angry Jogger), Dallas Tate and Noel Gaulin carried out some of the puppet work in the recent Spacestation 1985. Are these the usual suspects for the creditable puppetry in Boom for Real? If so, please leave a comment at the bottom of this column.
Despite these issues, Jason Tremblay’s own lucky, fateful escape is having one of his early plays produced by Paper Chairs. The high-energy production team of Lisa Laratta, Elizabeth Doss, Keri Boyd and all their collaborators never fails to produce edgy, memorable work. Boom for Real was an incredible party for Halloween 2012; it runs until November 10.
Michael Lee's 2-minute feature at KUT-FM, November 1
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Boom for Real
by Jason Tremblay
Paper Chairs
